The Secret Life of Aphra Behn by Janet Todd

The Secret Life of Aphra Behn by Janet Todd

The life, work and history of Aphra Behn: seventeenth -century dramatist, poet of the erotic and bisexual, novelist, political propagandist, spy.

Praise for the first hardback edition:

Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time. --the New York Times

Ground-breaking--it reads quickly and lightly. Even Todd's throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation. --Ruth Perry, MIT, Women's Review of Books

A major biography; of interest to everyone who cares about women as writers. --Times Higher Education Supplement

Fascinating, a page-turner and a delight, an astonishingly thorough book. --Emma Donoghue

All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn. . . . For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. --Virginia Woolf

Aphra Behn, a spy in the Netherlands and the Americas, was the first professional woman writer. The most prolific dramatist of her age, innovative novelist, translator, lyrical and erotic poet, she expresses a frank sexuality addressing impotence, orgasm and bisexuality, whilst serving as political propagandist for the monarch.

This revised biography of the extraordinary, ground-breaking writer, who is emblematic of the Restoration period, a time of masks and self-fashioning, is set in conflict-ridden England, Europe, and in the mismanaged slave colonies, following the Puritan republic in 1660.

Janet Todd, novelist and internationally renowned scholar, was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Rutgers, NJ. An expert on women's writing and feminism, she has published on many writers, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Aphra Behn.

Janet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton.

Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor ofJane Austen in Context and the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works areWomen's Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and theCambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils. Lady Susan Plays the Game is her first foray into fiction.

In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women's writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal Women's Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.